


to chase the stars

by ace_in_spades



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender, 僕のヒーローアカデミア | Boku no Hero Academia | My Hero Academia
Genre: Alternate Universe - Avatar & Benders Setting, Rated T for Bakugo's mouth
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-21
Updated: 2019-08-28
Packaged: 2020-09-23 01:51:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20332087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ace_in_spades/pseuds/ace_in_spades
Summary: The fire’s glow lit up half of Uraraka’s face as she glanced back at Izuku, who was trying to match her speed as they ran away from the burning building.A guard hollered after them, but his voice was lost to the cracking of the fire.“I thought,” Uraraka called out between short breaths, “you were an earthbender.”“I told you it was a misunderstanding,” he mumbled.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> disclaimer: geography of the actual avatar world will be ignored. sorry.

Had he been born a century earlier, it wouldn’t have been strange for Izuku to be a nonbender. From what he’s read, benders were actually in the minority back then. One in four people, the history books said. Now it was four in five. This era made him stick out like a sore thumb and he had Kacchan to remind him of that every day. 

“Ha. The shitty nonbender can’t even walk properly.” 

After being neighbors for so long, Izuku had no trouble picturing the sneer on Kacchan’s face down to the last detail. His hands balled into fists, ignoring the stinging of his scraped palms. He was on the ground, trying not to cough at the cloud of dusty dirt that erupted from his fall. In his haste, he tripped two feet in front of his front door.

Waving the dust away, he pushed himself up, holding back a retort. Responding to Kacchan never made anything better. 

“Hey!” Kacchan yelled. “Are you ignoring me, Deku?” 

A telltale whoosh made Izuku flinch. 

On the other hand, sometimes not responding only made things worse.

He turned to see Kacchan with twin bursts of fire shooting up from both of his palms. “N-no,” he said. “Not at all.”

“Where are you going?” The fire was the same violent red as Kacchan’s eyes, making them glow.

Izuku couldn’t help but shy away from it. Kacchan’s firebending skills were cool, he knew that as well as the rest of their earthbender village, but it could also be scary. Especially when it held the promise of burns if Kacchan wasn’t in a good mood.

“I-I was going to the library,” Izuku said. “The librarian told me they were getting new books today.”

Kacchan laughed. “Hoping you’ll be able to bend by reading about it?”

Izuku’s face heated up, and he wasn’t sure if it was from embarrassment or frustration, or from proximity to the fire. Kacchan found some of his notes on different bending styles almost a year ago and hadn’t stopped bringing it up. He opened his mouth to stammer out a reply he hadn’t prepared, but Kacchan plowed on. 

“I can’t wait until I can go to train at UA. Then I’ll get to leave this shitty town and become greater than All Might ever was.”

Greater than Avatar All Might? Even with training from the Fire Nation’s best bending school, was that even possible?

Regardless of nation, everyone’s heard of the man only known as All Might. Izuku had pages of notes dedicated to him, although he wished he had more. Avatar All Might was said to be the most powerful bender ever before he disappeared without a trace nearly fifteen years ago.

“Can a regular bender be more powerful than the Avatar?” Izuku wondered aloud. “You’d need to have perfect control over your bending along with strategies to make up for–”

Izuku’s muttering was cut off by a blast of fire almost close enough to singe his green hair. “Eep! Sorry! I’m sorry!”

“If the Avatar himself wants to challenge me, I’ll gladly crush his ass. But since he’s been MIA since before we were born, there’s no competition,” Kacchan said smugly. Arms crossed, his fire was nowhere to be seen. “Go to the library, useless nonbender. You’ll be reading about me in a couple years.”

Izuku nodded furiously until he had backed away enough to make a run for it. He didn’t stop until he reached the library.

Kacchan’s bending really was something. If anyone could be greater than All Might, Izuku supposed it would be him.

xxx

The sky had settled into a dusty shade of gray by the time Izuku left the library, the setting sun hidden by the mountains surrounding the village. He tilted his head back down and focused on the gravel road. He didn’t want to worry his mom. 

Balancing a stack of checked out books, Izuku began to hurry home. He was thinking about one of the books he had picked out, about airbending theory, when– 

“FUCKING DIE!”

Kacchan?

Hearing Kacchan yell was as normal as the sky being blue, but there was something off this time. 

Kacchan sounded desperate. 

Izuku’s pace quickened until he found himself running towards the yelling, clutching the books close to his chest. The green and brown houses lining the streets blurred into a muddy monochrome background until he rounded a corner into a small alley and froze. 

Izuku paled. “Kacchan?”

A huge ball of murky water was suspended midair, a scrawny man standing in front of it with an arm out, fingers contorted. With his other hand, he tried to keep coins from spilling out of a hole burned into his satchel. He hadn’t noticed Izuku.

Pale fingers poked out from the ball of water and a jet of fire soon followed, sputtering out as fast as they appeared. 

That’s when Izuku put it together, staring horrified. 

Blonde hair poked out next to the fingers, then Kacchan’s whole head. Water flattening his hair, dripping off his face as he gasped for air. “Die, criminal scum,” he tried to roar out, but his voice broke on the last word.

Through Izuku’s panic, a single thought rose to the forefront of his mind: the distracted burglar made for a chance to save Kacchan.

Before he realized what he was doing, Izuku grabbed the topmost book from his pile. Sending a silent apology to the librarian, he threw his arm back and hurled it at the man with as much force as he could muster. 

The book opened midair, pages rustling loudly in the wind, and the man looked up. With a slimy smile, a wall of water came up and intercepted the book. “Another brat, eh?”

Arm still suspended in the air, Izuku was paralyzed with fear. He hadn’t thought that out, just moving instinctevely, and now he was facing the consequences. He should have found someone who could actually take on this criminal.

The man approached him, his bag of coins forgotten on the ground. “What is it with you kids trying to stop me? I work as hard as anyone else to get money, you know. The angry one’s probably alerted half the village by now. At least two hostages are better than one,” the earthbender said, but Izuku wasn’t paying him much attention.

The waterbender had brought his hands up and all of the water had gathered in a pool above his head. 

Izuku spared a glance at Kacchan–he was on the ground, coughing–and the next second he was seeing everything through a screen of water. He blinked the stinging out of his eyes and held his breath, frantically swinging his arms to find any means of escape. His books were long forgotten, either on the ground or suspended with him. He kicked and thrashed. There was nothing for him to grab onto. Nothing for him to push himself out of the water with. 

His vision started dulling and he tried to move frantically, but his arms were so heavy, or maybe the water was getting thicker. 

Kacchan once said that he better pray to be born a bender in the next life. Izuku started tearing up because he was perfectly okay not being able to bend as long as he was alive and–

He really, really didn’t want to die. 

The ground roared and everything went white. 

xxx

Izuku cracked open his eyes, unsure when he had squeezed them shut in the first place. 

The alley was gone. In front of him was what could only be described as a battlefield. Before, it must have been an empty meadow, but now it was completely ravaged. The ground was marred by deep cuts and streaks of burned grass. Pillars of earth protruded from the land at odd angles, a cat owl perched on the tallest one.

The colors of the landscape were inverted, everything in shades of blues, purples, and other unnatural colors. 

He touched his throat, and took a deep breath, remembering the feeling of water filling his lungs from seconds before. “Did I… die?” he whispered. Though his voice sounded hollow to his own ears, he didn’t feel dead. His feet still stood firmly on the ground and pinching himself still made him jerk back.

“Not to worry, young man. You’re just in the spirit world.”

Izuku spun around fast enough enough to cause whiplash. A man with blond hair and sunken eyes was to his right, surveying the land in front of them. 

“The spirit world? What’s that? Who’re you?”

“Well,” the man said,“you’ve gone into the Avatar State, haven’t you?”

“The Avatar State? I-I don’t understand what you’re talking about. Who are you?”

The man turned towards Izuku, who squirmed under his gaze. Right when Izuku was about to repeat his question, streaks of smoke rose up and twisted around the man. 

They cleared to reveal a figure Izuku had only ever seen in drawings: tall and muscular, wearing simple blue clothing with hints of red and white.

“It’s fine now. Why? Because I am here!” the man boomed. 

Izuku’s eyes grew wide. “A-Avatar All Might?” he yelped as he took a step back, becoming more and more certain that somehow, this must just be a dream. 

“My name is Yagi Toshinori,” All Might said. His body flickered, and was soon replaced by the scrawny one from before. He paused to cough into his fist. “But it seems I am better known as All Might. And yes, I was the Avatar.”

What? Izuku played the last sentence over in his head until he fully processed the absurdity of the situation. The Avatar, hailed as a hero by all, was talking to Izuku. Even if this was a crazily-colored dream–and he was sure everything was too realistic for it to be one–that was still the weirdest thing to ever happened to him.

Wait a minute. 

“Was the Avatar?”

All Might nodded. “In taking out a foe, I’m afraid I myself died. Now, that torch has been passed to you, so it seems. What is your name?”

“Midoriya Izuku,” he mumbled automatically, his mind working a hundred miles a minute. “So you did die fifteen years ago... H-hold on, what do you mean passed to me?”

“You are the next Avatar, able to bend the four elements. It is a privilege and a responsibility passed from generation to generation.”

“Me?” Izuku squeaked. “I-” he cut himself off and looked down, willing away tears. The grass around his shoes swayed in an invisible breeze.“I can’t even bend one element.”

“Strange,” All Might said.

Izuku kept his eyes glued to the ground, but the blades of grass blurred together as his eyes gave in and filled with tears. He didn’t want to see the expression on his hero’s face after hearing that Izuku was practically useless. 

“No need to be ashamed, young Midoriya. If there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that courage matters most in a fight. Still, there must be something up with your chakras. I’m sure you wouldn’t be here unless you really were the Avatar.” All Might placed a hand on top of Izuku’s head. He blinked, his sunken eyes glowing pure white. “Hmm. How about now?”

xxx

Izuku’s head throbbed with dull pain. “Ow,” he groaned, rolling onto a...wooden floor?

He sat up, panicking at the sight of unfamiliar surroundings. He had been in a meadow–no, in an alley, really–but now metal bars stared him in the face. Behind them were some shelves and a desk, the whole room dimly lit by wall torches.

It was the inside a holding cell in the police station he had only ever seen from the outside, he realized.

What happened while he was unconscious?

A bubbly voice from the cell next to his made him jump.

“Hey. You’ve been out for almost an hour. Guards said you destroyed a few buildings. That’s really something, huh?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> next chapter will be up by next week.
> 
> thank you for reading!


	2. Chapter 2

The girl in the other cell was named Uraraka Ochako, and she’d heard the guards say that Izuku was found passed out at the center of a ring of earth spikes. A couple of the surrounding buildings had been at least partially demolished, she’d said. 

Going by that, Izuku was probably locked up for using earthbending to destroy property, but the biggest hole in that assumption was that _he wasn’t a bender. _

Oblivious to his confusion, Uraraka continued. “You must be a powerful earthbender then. I’m an airbender. Back home, we–”

Izuku, who hadn’t said a word throughout the explanation, finally found it in himself to formulate a question. He jerked his head up abruptly. “I’m really sorry to interrupt, Uraraka-san, but did the guards say when they were coming back?”

“Oh, sorry, I didn’t realize how much I was talking.” She smiled sheepishly. “The guards didn’t say if they were coming back and I don’t think they’re the type to come if we call for them,” she said, banging on the bars of her cell with an arm guard that matched her blue and pink outfit. “Hello? Anyone there?” After a moment, “I don’t think they’re coming back anytime soon.”

“Oh. My mom’s probably worried sick and–Kacchan! I don’t know if he’s okay!”

Uraraka clapped her hands together and Izuku jumped. 

“It seems like we have a common goal!”

“What do you mean?”

“Want to help me bust us out of here?”

He looked at her with wide eyes. “We can’t just break out of here! You could be a dangerous criminal I’d be letting loose! I’m sure you’ve been put in that cell for a reason.”

She leaned in as close as the bars between their cells would allow, whispering in mock accusation.“You’re in a cell too, Midoriya-san. Are you a dangerous criminal?”

“No!” He shook his head in vehement denial. “I think there was just some kind of misunderstanding.”

“Then I could be in here because of a misunderstanding too, right? There’s no guarantee that I did anything illegal.”

“...I guess.” Despite all common sense, Izuku was inclined to believe her. She didn’t seem like a bad person, and she was around his age. What kind of devious crimes could you be committing at fifteen?

“Great!” Uraraka said. “I was thinking that if we could get a guard in here, I could try taking his keys. I’m good at using my bending to levitate things, so I think that would work. Can you try to take on the guard?”

“Um,” he said eloquently. “I can’t… I can’t bend.”

“Oh, right! I forgot that this place was built with earthbenders in mind. Earthbender village and all.” She gestured to the tightly-packed wooden planks that made up floor. “There’s no earth in here to bend. Sorry, I’m not from around here.”

“That’s not really what I meant,” he mumbled. Louder, “I can distract the guard while you get the keys.”

“Perfect. Now we just need a way to get the guard in here…”

xxx 

Uraraka let out a short scream. There was the thud of heavy shoes. 

Izuku was back on the floor, eyes shut, trying to look as relaxed as possible while his heart was beating a million miles an hour. It was going to plan so far, but that’s not what he was worried about. 

He was following the lead of a stranger. Someone who might be a criminal. He was kind of freaking out.

But only internally. He had to essentially play dead. 

The footsteps came to a stop and Uraraka spoke, panicked. “He just collapsed! He was just standing and then he shook and fell down. Is he okay? Does he need a medic?”

She sounded convincing. That only added to Izuku’s unease. If she could lie so well now, who’s to say anything she’d been saying earlier was truthful?

The guard cursed and shuffled closer to Izuku. Keys jangled and his cell door clicked. The door creaked as it swung open and he held his breath. 

There was a woosh of air and the tinkling of keys, followed by a grunt from the guard. Uraraka’s cell door opened with a low groan.

Izuku opened his eyes and scrambled to his feet just in time to see Uraraka’s hands splayed out in front of her, the guard trying to push through a screen of wind. Her brow was furrowed in concentration. “Midoriya-san, now!”

Izuku panicked. He didn’t know how to fight. Kacchan was always the aggressive one, not him. What would Kacchan do? 

Before his brain could catch up, he thrust out an arm. He felt a tickling, starting in the center of his palm and then there was fire, creeping up his arm and casting harsh shadows on the walls.

A gust of Uraraka’s wind picked up the fire and sent it right towards the guard, who jumped back.

Uraraka made a break for the exit, but Izuku was stuck in place. He was staring at his arm. It wasn’t on fire anymore, but it wasn’t burned either. 

Did…he do that? He wiggled his fingers. Nothing felt any different.

“Midoriya-san!”

He snapped out of the trance but by then, the guard had regained balance, lunging for Izuku.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw Uraraka, waiting in the doorway, run back into the room. She swung her arms and wind slammed into the guard, knocking him into a wall. “Come on!”

This time, Izuku didn’t hesitate to follow her out the door. Behind then, the guard shouted something lost to the crackling of the flames. 

“I thought,” Uraraka called out between short breaths as they ran, “you were an earthbender.” 

“I told you it was a misunderstanding,” he mumbled. 

He sprinted after Uraraka, the cold night air stinging his face. They wove through the roads and stopped after making a sharp right into an alley, catching their breath. Dark smoke rose in the distance. 

“So, what was that?”

Izuku wrung his hands together. She could have left without him, but she chose to go back and make sure he got out too. She seemed trustworthy.

“I don’t know,” he blurted out. “I didn’t know I could bend and I’m still not even sure that that happened but I had a weird dream thing and Avatar All Might was there and now I think I’ve bent two elements.”

“Like the Avatar? Are you the Avatar?”

“I-Maybe?”

“That’s so cool!”

Izuku slumped against the alley wall. “I guess... but the Avatar’s supposed to keep the peace in the world. How am I supposed to do that if I don’t know how to bend? I only found out twenty minutes ago, and I’m probably grounded for life after setting the station on fire. And I don’t even know what happened to the last Avatar. But if I’m here, then…”

He looked up at Uraraka, who had fallen silent. He didn’t have to finish the sentence.

After a moment, she said, “There’s someone who could probably help you answer some of those questions, you know.”

“Who?”

“Gran Torino.”

“Gran Torino, All Might’s mentor. You’re right! But he’s more of a mystery than All Might, even. No one knows where to find him, or if he’s even alive.”

Anything Izuku could find on Gran Torino in the library was always contradicted by another source, from appearance to ability. Unlike All Might, he stayed out of the spotlight, and recordings of his interactions were rare. The one thing everyone agreed on was that he was the greatest airbender alive. 

“Actually, he lives in the Air Nation, like me. Every so often, I hear stories about him passing though different towns, or helping travellers. If we asked around enough, I’m sure we could find him.”

“That sounds great, Uraraka-san, really. I just–my mom is here. And I should check to see if Kacchan’s okay. The nations are at peace. The world doesn’t need saving right now.”

“Don’t you want to know what happened to All Might? Solve the biggest mystery of our generation?”

“Of course.”

“And I’m sorry to say–” she grimaced “–but I’m not sure your village would be ecstatic that you torched the police station. If it was a misunderstanding before, it’s not anymore.”

Izuku frowned. “Yeah…”

“Hey, don’t be like that. We can say goodbye to your mom and your friend before we go. When we come back, this will have completely blown over. And you’ll have learned how to be the greatest Avatar ever.”

“Okay.” He looked at her, determined. “We’ll find Grand Torino and I’ll learn how to be the Avatar. I promise to live up to All Might’s legacy. 

“I believe you can do it.” Uraraka’s eyes were shining with something. It looked a lot like admiration, but it could have just been the light. 

Izuku blushed anyway. “Now,” he said, “to get home without getting caught.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> not sure when the next chapter will be up. chapter notes are also kinda glitchy for me so if you see two ignore the other one.
> 
> thank you for reading!

**Author's Note:**

> next chapter should be up in around a week. spell check is my only beta so please let me know if you catch any errors. 
> 
> thank you for reading!


End file.
